Shock and Awe

At long last summer nears its end, and Ye Olde Academy beckons once again. Time to try to get back to the everyday reality. I don't know if it'll be possible, though. The events of this, the summer that wound up not happening (grim fanfare), have changed things wayyyyyy too much for there to be any hope of it ever being the same (or something like that...).

I haven't posted anything but song links for ages. I need to do some updating...

• My father-in-law has finally chilled out a bit. He has started getting more than two hours of sleep per night and has stopped trying to be a non-stop workaholic. He pretty much had to; his health finally fell apart out from under him. His near-constant temper tantrums and irrational demands have eased off, too. Not completely, mind you, but enough for there to be some peace around here.
• He wasn't the only one in the family to have health issues, either. On Tuesday the 12th my wife woke up with a positively nasty stomach bug coupled with leg and hip pain and a nasty cough...but she went to work anyway. On the 13th I came down with the same symptoms, but even worse. I was wiped out for almost two full days. On the 14th, as I was finally getting better, my son got sick. FIL finally insisted on taking him to the doctor (which my wife and I had both refused to do as we assumed it to be a normal "24-hour flu"), but he didn't really tell the doctor very much. The doctor, not knowing that others in the family had been sick with the same symptoms, took one look at my son's fat gut and dismissed it as "metabolic syndrome from overeating". (Naturally, FIL immediately accepted that line without question.) Finally, on the 16th, my daughter came down with the same symptoms AND FIL's condition got a whole lot worse. I took my daughter to the same doctor who had "seen" my son, but this time I gave him a detailed explanation. He ordered a full battery of tests on my daughter as "representative" of my family. It turned out she had a mycoplasma infection. Last year there was a bit of a mycoplasma epidemic in this area, and all the schools had to take various preventative measures. My daughter apparently got it, and has likely had it for a while. At any rate, the doctor said that, barring a test result showing me NOT infected, I should assume my whole family had the disease and should see about getting medicine for it. (Apparently there is only one type of medicine that is an effective cure, as mycoplasma is resistant to ordinary antibiotics.) FIL had also been having terrible leg pain and a sore throat, so, just in case, I loaded him up in my BLUE RAV4 (practically by force since he didn't want to leave the house) and left to try to get him and myself examined. As it turned out, almost every clinic in this part of Japan was closed for the Obon holidays, so we finally went to the emergency room of the nearest large hospital (the only thing that was open!) and hoped for the best. Luckily, it wasn't busy. We got tested soon and both came up negative. My wife and son also got tested last Monday and came up negative. I guess my daughter was the only unlucky one...for now at least.
• I usually like a good thunderstorm. I also like rainy days. However, we've been having high-intensity thunderstorms coupled with torrential rains almost every day for the past week! It's starting to get a bit old. It's bad enough that I have to keep shutting down my computer and disconnecting my modem when I have so many things to do. When it really gets going, the thunder can make the house shake. We can hear light fixtures and appliances buzz and crackle along with nearby lightning strikes. And that RAIN... Yesterday I was coming back from Ye Olde Academy when, about a kilometer from home, marble-sized raindrops started falling at a lazy pace. Plop...plop...plop...plop...plop. Then the thunder and lightning started. Five minutes later, as I was pulling into my driveway, it turned into one of the heaviest gully-washers I've ever seen. The ditch next to my parking spot was overflowing after only a few minutes. The road was a creek. Meanwhile, close-range lightning strikes continued to flash and bang all around me. I decided to stay in my car and wait it out. Twenty minutes later, with no sign of it letting up, my wife came driving in from a supermarket run. Sighing, I jumped out of my car to help her carry bags...and was completely drenched in a couple of seconds. We had another storm like that today. I was already home at the time, but this time our new bathroom's roof started leaking badly. The fishpond out front overflowed, too, sending my daughter out in pursuit of a couple of would-be runaways. I didn't close the open upstairs window in time, either, meaning wind-driven rain got blasted into the bedroom for at least the third time in the past week. (No, I won't keep the window shut. It gets too hot up there otherwise!) The main path through the yard is turning into a gully. I can only imagine what havoc this is all wreaking on farmers in this area.
• I finally decided to make up for the grimness and emptiness of this summer by getting myself a present. One thing I'd long thought of getting for Studio Moodio is a MIDI controller keyboard. (Until now I've either used one of my keyboard synths or programmed notes using the mouse and computer keyboard.) An ordinary one wouldn't do, either; I wanted a full, 88-key type with piano-touch keys. I finally settled on getting a Yamaha KX8, which is a very sweet-looking machine (AND available on Amazon Japan, meaning no need to drive all the way to one of those music shops). There were only a few problems, a couple of which had to do with its size and bulk. I couldn't put it on my existing synth rack, and it was too big to stow in a corner or under a bed. Then I got to looking around and thinking. For basic MIDI programming, a more typical MIDI keyboard controller would be just as good if not better. And as for the 88-key piano-touch keyboard, I recently had a clerk at a music store tell me that, if all I really wanted was the keyboard, it would make far more sense to get a portable digital piano like the Casio Privia, since it had the basic features I wanted without the fluff, could be used in a wider variety of situations, and COST A LOT LESS. I finally wound up getting a Privia PX-120 at a local home electronics store and ordering an Edirol PC-80 from Amazon and, after all the discounts were figured in, paid probably about the same as I would have for the KX8 and a new synth rack. Yes, now I have two keyboards to have to store (and will probably unload the old Korg DSS-1 to make room...after finally just having found an English manual for it), but I'm quite happy about the acquisition. The PC-80 came TODAY, and I was just playing around with it on this computer. Man...talk about speeding up my music arranging/composing by a factor of ten! I seriously wonder why the f*** I didn't buy one of these things AGES ago! Fortunately my wife hasn't killed me (yet...).

Hey...Japan's softball team just won the Olympic gold medal! They beat the U.S.A.! NO ONE has EVER beaten the U.S.A. in Olympic softball! But I think I'll save all my Olympic testimonials and diatribes for another post.